Michael Symon up for a ‘Throwdown’ in Food Network competition series
Michael Symon loves to teach, compete and of course, cook and he displays all three in a competition series upcoming on Food Network.
In “Throwdown With Michael Symon,” a four-episode series premiering with a double episode on Tuesday, Dec. 14, the chef, restaurateur and cookbook author ventures onto the home turf of top New York chefs and challenges them to a – well, see the title – in which he takes on that chef ’s signature dish and creates his own interpretation of it.
The twist here is that the chef in question doesn’t know this is a competition, only that they’ll be filming a Food Network special. Then Symon makes his way through the crowd and throws down his figurative gauntlet. A pair of special guest judges blindly evaluates the final product and declares a winner.
So while the chef has the home crowd and the signature dish to their advantage, Symon has the element of surprise on his side.
“It’s my kind of favorite show,” explains Symon, who just released his new cookbook “Fix It With Food: Every Meal Easy,” “where for me I get to be a chef, which I love; there’s a lot of just like natural teaching moments in the show, which I love; we get to feature basically two great chefs/restaurateurs per episode, so maybe people get to discover some new places.
“And then it ends in competition, which everybody else loves ...,” he adds with a laugh. “So I think it’s one of those few shows that hits on all those elements.”
Tuesday’s opener takes Symon first to Brooklyn’s Pig Beach to throwdown against chef Matt Abdoo and his signature burger. Then in the second, he shows up at the downtown Manhattan Eastern European eatery Tzarevna to challenge owners Ricky and Mariia Dolinsky in making their khachapuri, a cheesy stuffed bread from the nation of Georgia.
For Symon, the decadent dish required a substantial learning curve.
“That was a fun one for me,” he says, “because it’s something that I’ve never made, khachapuri. So you kind of go to a restaurant and learn the history of the dish and the different varieties of it and what someone who specializes in Georgia cuisine, what they think makes it special and unique. It was a great history lesson and learning experience for me and to taste all the different varieties was pretty awesome.”